by Deeanne Gist
She sees the priest come in, take off his loafers. She smiles at his bare feet. It is a wonder they let him get away with that.
The priest stands in line behind her, painfully aware of her presence. There are three electric inches between them. He glances down to her folding shoulder blades, the smallness of her back, the curve under her skirt. The trusty smirks.
The visiting sergeant signals the lady forward, through the hum of the machine. She carries nothing metal: no jewelry, no watch, no phone, no pens or hair clips. Her hands are empty except for a single piece of paper.
The priest unloads pockets full of random items: paper clips, loose keys, cards with magnetic strips, an old falling-apart wallet. His cheeks grow flushed as he fills the plastic tray, and then he is signaled through. She smiles as he fills his pockets.
They walk down a very steep, long corridor that leads down into the bowels of Cellblock A, where another guard awaits to usher them through the series of locking doors that will take them deeper and deeper into the prison, down below to the final stairwells leading into our dungeon.
The lady is silent as they pass through the thunderbolts of the locks. She holds the lanyard on her chest like a security talisman. The guards look at the priest with contempt. The lady, they eye carefully. The warden has warned them about her; she is not there to do them any good.
The priest walks next to her. He is aware only of her scent—soap and fresh air.
They are almost down to the dungeon when the lady seems to sense him and turns to look up at him. She is down below, and he is here, and what is she to do with this warm body among the almost dead. She cannot stop them all from dying, and so she knows that the noises of their breathing and snoring and pleas behind the bars are all pathetic offerings against the reality of time running out. She cannot begin to care who breathes and who dies down here, because if she did, it would crush her.
The priest seems to understand—he does without speaking. His eyes are on her as if he is trying to pull something out of his chest. As if he is administering not to the dead but to someone who might care.
“I’m not signing that,” York says, looking at the medical release in her hand.
The lady gets close to him in the cage. Not close enough so he can reach but within an inch of his possible grip. “I know you say you want to die,” she says, and her voice is calm and hard. “I respect your choice.”
“Then you don’t need that paper,” he says with a flick of his dark eyes.
She looks again at the medical release. She meets his eyes. Both are struck again by how similar they look—like dark woods creatures slinking out of fern and clover. They could be brother and sister for how alike they look.
“You know what I am trying to do,” she says. “I’m trying to save you from execution. And unlike most of my clients, you don’t want to be saved. But I want it.”
“Why? Because you love me?” His voice is snide. “Because you care?”
“No.” She feels her voice turn into a calm river.
“Why, then?”
“It’s my job.”
For the first time, she sees a light in his dark eyes. She can see what a strangely charismatic man he was, despite his oddly formed little body. She can see how easy it was for him to do those terrible things. To real women like her.
He bursts out laughing, those strangely notched teeth thrown back. “So it’s not about me,” he says. “You’re different. I heard that before, but it’s true.”
She leans over. “I’m going to build you a castle,” she says.
“Yeah?” He sounds amused.
The amusement dies when she comes close enough to the cage that he could grab her, but she acts as if she knows he will not, and she is right. He can see the determination in her eyes. “We don’t have much time.”
He returns her chilly gaze. “I still want to die.”
“I know.”
The bouncing ball, as she hopes, takes her back out to the blue country. She packs an overnight bag so she can take her time and then find a motel room. Maybe she can even find a cabin along those emerald lakes. The idea fills her with a delicious, unexpected anticipation.
The town is called Squiggle Creek. It isn’t much farther past Sawmill Falls, down roads that whip and twist, and the sense of déjà vu grows as she travels, until she becomes convinced she may never find her way home, and she would not argue with it, being lost in these blue woods.
The last doctor has died, but he left his records in the hands of his daughter, who runs a café and bakery in the building where her father practiced. Luckily, the daughter has stored all her father’s medical records in the dusty attic. “I keep telling myself to get rid of these things,” she says as the lady follows her broad rump up the creaking pull-down attic stairs.
An hour later, with dust on her shirt, the lady carries a thin folder with two names crookedly typed on the outside. In the other hand, she has a white paper bag with a thick turkey sandwich she has bought from the daughter in the coffee shop, who looked at the lady’s small frame with pity before adding an extra swipe of cooked salad dressing from what looked like a handmade crock.
The lady stops at the aptly named Squiggle Creek on her way out of town. She crosses a little footbridge and carefully slides down the bank to where the stream narrows into a deep pool. She sits at the edge on a boulder and eats her sandwich. After the first startled bite, she realizes it is made out of chunks of real turkey from some leftover bird, along with a tangy cranberry relish and that fresh old-fashioned cooked dressing, all on two thick doorstops of homemade white bread. The sandwich is satisfying in a way most food isn’t to her. She eats the whole thing and watches the baby fish come up to the edge of the bank, nibbling at the pebbles. The fresh tumbling water makes her think of drinking and thirst and the hunger she has always felt—if she could swim in this creek, and wade away to forever, she might be whole.
A man comes down the bank. He is tall and thin, with graying sideburns, and dressed in old jeans and a pair of battered cork boots. He carries a fishing pole in one hand, his other fingers laced into the plastic-ring top of a six-pack.
He gives her a simple, affectionate woods smile. “Afternoon,” he says.
“Afternoon. Where does this creek go?” she asks.
“Where they all do, I guess.”
She smiles. “Where’s that?”
“The lakes.”
She rises and dusts the crumbs from her slacks. Her bottom feels cold from the boulder. “Do the people round here ever call them anything but the lakes?”
He looks amused. “No, ma’am. Just the lakes.”
“And why is that?” she asks. She says this in a playful voice but suddenly the answer seems very important to her, and this tall woodsman with his gentle smile seems safe to give it.
“Well—I suppose some things don’t need names, do they, ma’am?”
She smiles and it is like a sudden lifting of her spirits, a real sunshine smile. “No,” she says, still grinning hugely at him, and he is grinning back. “Some things don’t need names.”
It is dusk by the time she gets back to the lakes, and she has a headache from peering over the steering wheel as she turns the dark forested corners. She is convinced she will not find a place to stay and will be forced to drive in the dark through the woods. Then she sees a neon Vacancy sign on the side of the road. It is an old-fashioned road motel, with small cabins along the lake’s edge.
She parks in the little asphalt lot. She is almost shaking as she gets out of her car. A flood of emotions has come over her. She walks down to the water’s edge. The emerald lake spreads in front of her, the caps of water lit with gold tints from the fading sun. Powerful smells come across the waters on a cool breeze: fir and cedar, water and fish, deep growing things and all the weight of the surrounding forests. It is as if the blue forests want to say breathe to her, and she wants to say back, yes.
She gets the room key from an old woman who doe
sn’t even come up to her chin. The woman has a Greek accent, and on the tiny chipped counter next to the register, she has an array of homemade goodies wrapped loosely in waxed paper. “You take a treat?” she asks, handing the lady a palm-sized pastry along with her key. The whole scene begins to feel surreal, and the lady worries briefly that she is having another déjà vu episode. She knows she is not. She is experiencing something for the first time in her life—a sense of place. This is a good place, her body tells her.
The lakeside cabin is old but clean, with a warm sense that someone actually has been there, wiping the counters and shaking out the homemade quilt.
The minute she sits on the soft bed, she has a strong urge to call the priest. Come home, she wants to say, which is strange, because she has never wanted to call him before.
She turns on the old television and dials through a comforting static before realizing there are only three channels out here. She turns off the television. She sits on the edge of the bed eating her pastry, which crackles with honey and walnuts. She hears an owl call and a break of brush from an animal, hears a television in another room and a woman’s voice and the sound of water lapping against the shore. She lies down and thinks of the laurel hedge of her childhood, and the magical world inside it, and how she could never tell anyone that even now, as she drifts to sleep, she imagines a place where she can feel whole.
Back in her cold city apartment, the lady reads the old medical records for York and his mother. His attorneys will be happy, she knows, when she tells them.
What the attorneys don’t know is the fever that follows finding poison.
Her clients rarely walk to freedom—that is a myth. She can count her truly innocent clients on one finger. Most of the men she works with are guilty. They may not be guilty of all they were charged, but they are guilty of more than enough. Many are guilty of even worse, the crimes that were suspected and never proved.
No, the dream of the death row client is to escape execution for a life behind bars. They want to escape the dungeon into the rest of the prison. They want a visit from their mom that involves a touch. They want to stand in the sun, to play a game of ball, to eat at a table with other men, to see the sky and feel the wind. Those are their dreams, maybe small to others but huge to them. It is a modest dream, in a sense, and yet one that is amazingly hard to achieve for a man on death row.
At least all of her clients have wanted that except for one—York.
The lady goes to bed and thinks of a beautiful girl who managed to have “miscarriage” after miscarriage starting at age eleven, until by some miracle she avoided Dr. Hammond’s abortion fish hook until it was too late and she gave birth to a little baby boy when she was sixteen. In a note at the bottom of York’s birth record, the doctor had scribbled, Sterilized. There was no consent form or signature.
Shirley probably didn’t even know that Dr. Hammond had done it—so the town men could go on fucking her without recourse or retribution. She was a little girl who displayed obvious signs of the brain damage and venereal disease that would take her life. Only instead of receiving help, she was passed around like a broken toy.
What was it like? It had to be a dark time for the town. Maybe it played as much a role in the town’s decline as the death of timber, as guilty souls and angry women slunk away and a vacant, beaten Shirley was left to wander the streets with a malnourished little boy in her arms.
And as for little York? His medical records were cursory, as if Dr. Hammond didn’t have the time to bother with the unwanted. But each limited entry told a terrible story. Dislocated hips at age one—as if someone had spread his little legs into a frog shape and pressed with adult weight. Strange illnesses that came and went. Burns to the arms at age two. A “wet gray fungus” growing near his anus for the better part of a year when he was only three. Will not respond to sulfur, the doctor had written, and seemed to give up until the fungus went away on its own. Missing clumps of hair. Partial unexplained deafness. Broken toes, lacerations, burns to fingers.
If child abuse had a record, this was it.
And each time the good Dr. Hammond bandaged the child of the town slut and sent him back to whatever hell he lived in.
She sleeps and she dreams, hot dreams, and several times she startles awake, knowing she has shouted something into the empty night. The nightmares are back. She dreams of glittering knives and of men falling to earth in boxcars from heaven. She dreams of men who lie on children, breaking their little hips into frog shapes. The men pull out knives and flay the toddlers, holding the wet skins like flags in the night. She is in her damp childhood bed again, listening for footsteps in the dark.
A man is standing by her bed. He turns into York. He is holding a knife.
Tit for tat, York says in her dreams while he slashes. Tit for tat.
It is always like this. The nightmares are like some loathsome midnight monster that spawns whenever she is deep inside a case, when she begins to see the person who did the terrible things. She becomes his heart, his family, his victim.
She thinks of York’s mother, and she turns her face to the wet pillow and dreams again.
Years ago, when I was general population in the cellblock far above me, I had a little window. I was lucky to have that slot of stone, barred with iron, that gave my nose air and, if I wanted to pull up with my aching arms, a view of the sky.
Down below that window was the yard I avoided. During the days, I could hear the crash of metal, hear the catcalls of my tormentors. I would crouch under that window, convinced they could see through the stone.
But in the evenings? I had the freedom of a view.
The lip of that sill lifted me to my heaven. At dusk, when the yard cleared and no one was around but the walking shadows, I could see into the world itself.
As the night around me fell during those days, I could hear the men down the halls going to mess or the showers or the activities room—the faint din of thousands of men as they buried their ways inside the emptiness of our walls. That was when the yard was cool and serene and empty.
That was when I would perch, remembering the books I had stored in my heart that day to forget the ache and sadness of my body. I would hold myself on that windowsill and just look into the yard below. So beautiful it was, filled with soft shadows. How the dust looked as the sun fell, like freshly driven snow. How the baseball diamond glowed to where I could see the reason for the name. How the guard towers softened in the falling light, and the guards held their night rifles like dark toys.
Bit by bit the sun would go down, and the sky would fade to purple and then to close, and the faintest stars would twinkle beneath the dusk, and the yard seemed truly empty—and waiting. The air glowed before the night canvassed the sky with blackness.
That was when I would see the soft-tufted night birds.
I never knew when the birds would come. It might be one night out of three for weeks or only once an entire year. Like the golden horses or the men with hammers, the birds were free. On lucky nights, they would appear out of nowhere and fall out of the sky like soft darts from heaven. One, two, three. Four and then many.
I could see them so clearly from my cell window—see their soft warm bodies, warm bundles of gray and brown feathers, see the spread of their brown tails and the tilt of their inquisitive heads as they fell past me. Their eyes were warm and dark and all-seeing, like the eyes of the lady.
The first bird would always land in the yard and waddle out to the middle, alone. As if that gray expanse were nothing to her, as if it took no courage. And then following her with mincing steps came the other birds, as if heralding her courage. They would lower their wings and dance around her like a ballet. As much as she preened, you could see she was alone out there, plain and dowdy.
The other birds would spread their soft pummeled wings, like graphite mixed with brown stone. Tiny steps at first, tracing their very wingtips in the dust, and then greater steps that were not broader or bigger but were s
omehow stronger, like the stamping of tribal feet. The birds raised their claws and traced those wings through the dust, and after a while I saw that they left a pattern—a life pattern.
Sometimes I wanted to clap my hands to see what would happen. Of course I never would do that. I just watched, holding perfectly still, a lone face embedded in the stone.
For at least an hour, the soft-tufted night birds would dance, tracing their circles in the dust until the entire yard was decorated with the lace of their efforts.
And then all at once, as if a silent explosion had happened elsewhere, as if an alarm had sounded in a distant sky, the soft-tufted birds would stop, freeze, and look up. One by one the females would lift dun wings and take flight. Their forlorn male dancers would rise reluctantly after them until the dark purple sky was filled with their churning wings.
And then the sky was empty. The brown birds and their soft-tufted angel boys were gone.
I would watch them go and wonder about where they went. I thought it was probably a tree in a faraway forest. It would be a dream tree, and the branches would be filled with dozens of them, dark and warm and roosting. A child could fall asleep under that tree and wake up reborn.
Then my eyes would drift to the soft dusty yard, traced with their wing patterns.
A breeze would come, picking up to a brisk wind, and I knew by morning all those delicate patterns would be gone. The dust would be fresh again, like the smooth skin of a baby. So that when the men came out in the morning, they would tear no fabric, render no skin.
The soft-tufted night birds are like that. They are peaceful animals that want no harm.
It is amazing what we hear down here in the dungeon. The guards talk all day as they sit on their stools down the hall, watching us—watching a cellblock where nothing ever happens, where the doors rarely open. If they are lucky, once a week, they might chain a man to take him to the Dugdemona cage. The only way to fill the empty space and endless boring hours is with words.